Café Con Monica

A real love letter

I was going to blog about the last two weeks since I have been MIA and I probably will later today but I wanted to share this. My friend has a great blog I read as often as possible and I have been slacking then he called me today and told me check out some of his latest stuff. Talk about venting. I wanted to share this with everyone because this is one of the things I love about blogging is being able to let it all out in a creative manner for the world to see. Say what you have to say and let the world take it how they please.

So if you have time check out this post on Living Vicariously.


Are you F’ing kidding me?!

This weekend was for the most part a very good weekend except for the shit-show that was my Saturday night. Now I know you will be skimming this post trying to find out about Saturday but you can wait for that. I have decided that it may actually be time for me to take a breather from alcohol. My behavior this week has been less than stellar once liquor gets involved. The thing is that most people assume I am some kind of crazy drinking alcoholic, the truth is I very rarely drink during the week or more than just when I am at the bar/club. I do not drink wine with dinner or have a drink to relax. I am just not that kind of person, this could be the reason that when I do drink it ends up being drink after drink after drink. Who knows the real reason. Either way I had an eventful week.

Wednesday was the 2nd annual company boat party. I had a pretty good time on the boat last year so I had much to look forward to. This year E and I decided we should hit the bar in The Bosses office and get the party started. A little vodka and orange juice turned into 2 very strong drinks, one before and one for the trolley ride to the harbor. Quite ridiculous as I was pretty drunk before we boarded the boat. Thank goodness for being a lady and remembering to wear boy shorts under my dress or we could have had some disaster coming down those damn steps. It was open bar. Enough said right? Well I drank, a lot. It was fun we even got to see the usual Navy Pier fireworks from the boat. That was a first for me so I think I can say that was pleasant. I have a coworker who shall not be named but usually has a stick up their ass and that person was actually quite pleasant when drunk. I advise that person drink a lot more and we could get along pretty damn well. After the trolley ride home some of us headed to a bar near wor
k. Thank god at this point I had decided it was time to drink 7-up. I don’t really know what brought about this decision but I was so damn thankful on Thursday morning. It was a great night but sometimes I think I need to remember you can’t drink like that with co-workers…it can be a bit of a mess. The whole office was nursing a hangover on Thursday. That picture up there is about the only decent picture I can find and it doesn’t even really show we were on a boat.
Friday was a good relaxing evening at the Taste of Chicago. For those of you who are not from here or just don’t know the Taste is a festival of sorts that is held every year downtown and restaurants from around the city offer some of their best selections.

You pay a ridiculous amount for an insufficient amount of tickets and you eat, eat, eat and people watch. The type of people that frequent this event are often great for watching. This year the Taste was shorter/smaller than usual and had less performances; the city cites budget issues I blame the many ridiculous shootings happening. We didn’t have a bad time, I have had some shitty experiences at the Taste before but this was pleasant. I went with The Boy, G & S and Baby M. I ate way too much food and even made sure we left before the end for fear of being shot. G was complaining about Flash Mobs coming to get us all night. The one thing I did remember was how much I hate teenagers. They annoy me to no end and when they are in groups I contemplate seriously offing all of them. But that would not be a good thing, I am not fit for jail time. But well fro
m what I read yesterday I could probably get awa
y with killing a few of them if I lie to the police. That is me & G sitting curbside watching the ridiculousness that is Chicagoans.
Saturday was a long day… First I was supposed to go to the beach early and am still not sure how I ended up going at 2 in the afternoon and spending 2 hours there. I pretty much spent the majority of my morning waiting. No offense to T, because I love her but from now on I may need to meet people at the beach. I can lay o
ut and they can get there when they get there. If I am going to the beach I want to get there early and get the best sun. That just makes sense in my head. T, R & I went to eat Mexican food after and then I headed home for a nap.
Saturday night started out with getting ready and doing a little pregaming. I had an old HS friend come out and we did a little drinking before we got there. Poor girl must have forgotten how much I drink when we go out, I definitely felt like I may have “peer pressured” her into a few drinks. We drank ALOT…there was another episode where the conversation about shots went like this:
O: What do you want?
Me: Anything but tequila, dairy or red bull
O: Damn, what is left?
Me: I dont know
I bet you can’t guess what happened next? A round of Patron shots. Even though I knew I should just walk away I took the shot. This is where you enter the “fuzzy, gray black out period”. Since I can’t tell you what happened after this from actual knowledge I can tell you what I was told…I got into a trolley to go to another bar, had my head in The Boy’s lap, fell down the stairs trying to get out of the trolley, said something really stupid to The Boy in line for said bar and get left, I then proceeded to have a seat on the sidewalk and cry hysterically. After this X and I took a cab home where I waited for The Boy and cryed and cryed some more then we went for Mcdonalds. I don’t recall a damn thing but I know I woke up with puffy eyes and alot of shame. This is me on the trolley I do not remember taking.
Sunday I got a text from G saying he needed a ride as he had ended up in a hotel room downtown. After going to his rescue he and The Boy drove me to the burbs to visit my family. I spent Sunday and Monday hanging out with them in recovery. Pretty uneventful, saw the fireworks and nearly broke a hip on the slip & slide…as it turns out I am actually getting a little too old for it now.
It took me over a week to write this post since last week when I started I was still too ashamed of myself to post it. I swore never to drink again….and then Saturday came along again.

A slap in the face

Weight gain is a progression as is obviously the loss. I have to keep reminding myself of this everytime I get on the scale and don’t see any movement. I have been reading a few blogs from people on a weight loss journey and they have photos of themselves and numbers and all that good stuff. I decided to take a trip down memory lane and go back as far as my Facebook photos will allow to see the progression. It was actually pretty disturbing to me to see how I got so big. I like to think I didn’t realize it at the time but I think I must have because it was hard to find full body photos of myself from about 2006-2009. Really hard. Everything was waist or chest up and even those were bad. I fluctuate in weight very quickly and that is most likely due to the extreme nature of the dieting I have been doing but just as quickly as I lose those pounds they come right back when I fall off the wagon. I am actually kind of afraid to post what I am about to put here but I know that it will help me keep referring back to this post to keep myself in line.

The first picture I will post is the weight I am actually aiming to get back to. I know it seems ridiculous to hope for your highschool weight but in my senior year I had put on a bit of weight and back then I was traumatized by it but now I think I looked amazing. The last picture is the most recent picture of me in a swimsuit in March of this year.

2003-17 years old

I couldn’t find any pictures between 2004 to 2006 but clearly you can see alot changed. I may have been at my heaviest here but I am not sure.

Below(2006)

Below (2007)

At some point between 2007 and 2008 I did actually see a scale and I was 198. Not sure if that was heavier than the year before or not but I did actually start to workout at that point.

Below(2008)
 Between 2008-2009 I worked out occasionally but rarely dieted. I mainted about 175-185 during most of that time.

Below (2009)

Still working out but definitely not dieting I was still in the weight range.

Below(early 2010)

In September of 2009 I started Medifast(see this) and when I started I weighed in at 173. After 6 weeks I was down to 143. Thats the picture below(October 2010)

I did great from October to January and then it went downhill
Below (NYE 2011)

I pretty much gave up on dieting and exercise for 2 months and gained almost half the weight I lost back. A couple weeks before Miami I tried Medifast and had to quit because I broke out in hives(*still not sure if that was from the food) so here is me around 155

March 2011

And this is May 2011…back around 150-155 and fighting it. I have a ways to go to get down to 135 and I am hoping this post helps.

This blog is definitely not dedicated to my journey but it is a big part of my life so I am sure there will be more posts and hopefully they will be with some good news and sexy photos!

FOLLOW

@cafeconmonica

[instagram-feed]